Although well-written and sometimes illuminating, Nancy McCleans Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Rights Steal Plan for America is so factually unreliable and tenuously argued that it is best viewed not has a serious work of historical investigation, but rather as a work of speculative historical fiction. Rather than expose the nefarious, anti-democratic motives of the public choice movement, and its founder James M. Buchanan, McCleans misinformed and misguided book is an object lesson in how not to do intellectual history.